Window on Eurasia: Pussy Riot Links to Yurodstvo Tradition Threatens Moscow Patriarchate, Commentator Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 20 – Roman Avdeyev, a Moscow banker whose blog post last summer about the Pussy Riot case triggered a firestorm of criticism, appears likely to provoke even more dissent now that he has suggested that this case recalls Russia’s yurodstvo tradition and thus threatens the Moscow Patriarchate more seriously than many have thought.

                Avdeyev, who owns a bank but frequently comments on religious and social issues in his blog, having acknowledged that his first essay on the Pussy Riot case (slon.ru/russia/pr-816802.xhtml) was controversial, nonetheless appears set to cause even more with his latest post (slon.ru/russia/bankety_v_khrame_khrista_spasitelya_po_sledam_pussy_riot-910738.xhtml).  

            Discussions about the Pussy Riot activists who are serving prison sentences for having staged an unsanctioned and many believe disrespectful demonstration in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior had largely died down, Avdeyev notes, but Patriarch Kirill’s recent remarks about it has once again made it the subject of much commentary.

            Avdeyev notes that he recently read Sergey Ivanov’s work on the history of yurodstvo (“Blazhenny okhaby: Kul’turnaya istoria yurodstva, Moscow: Yazyki slavyanskikh kultur, 1995) and immediately recognized that one can “draw an analogy between that which the Pussy Riot group did in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the actions of the ancient holy fools.”

            (Avdeyev may be the first Russian to draw this parallel, but others outside of Russia have already done so, e.g., the August 2012 post on planetransgender.blogspot.com/2012/08/this-pussy-writer-riots-with-yurodstvo.html which argues this tie make Pussy Riot “a Real Threat not just to Putin but [to] the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church.”)

  

            The Moscow blogger hastened to add that no one should think that he was “equating the young women from Pussy Riot with the Orthodox blessed,” but he then suggested that “nevertheless, there is a certain link between the two phenomena” that helps to explain why the Patriarchate and the Kremlin behind it may have reacted so violently last year.

            The tradition of yurodstvo, of holy fools, is that of people who completely reject this world in the name of the search for the Kingdom of Heaven, Avdeyev points out.  Many of these people rejected at the same time “all the traditional features of earthly life” and were prepared to “commit insane actions” in their pursuit of holiness.

            For example, the Moscow commentator says, Vasiliy the Blessed, a 16^th century holy fool “according to his hagiography went about through the city completely nude and even went into churches and monasteries that way.” He attacked a revered icon and would have been killed had it not been found that behind the icon’s top surface there were pictures of devils. 

            Despite their often strange behavior, the holy fools often displayed “the deepest spiritual meaning,” Avdeyev continues.  “They exposed lies and hypocrisy” in the Church and society, and “they were not afraid to speak the truth even to the tsar – and even when the tsar in question was Ivan the Terrible!”

            “It seems to me,” the Moscow blogger says, that the way the Moscow Patriarchate responded to the Pussy Riot case demonstrated that the Church lacks “not only mercy” but also “an honest view on the action in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior as an exposure of those distortions which our church life is being subjected to.”

             Many hierarchs of the Church were outraged by the actions of Pussy Riot, “but why up until now has none of the believers expressed anger about the analogous songs and choruses that are regularly conducted on the stage of the Hall of the Church Assemblies,” with the patriarch and members of the Synod often in attendance?

            “Why has no one even once raised concerns about the doubtful, from the point of view of Orthodox piety, banquets which are regularly held” in the Patriarchate’s facilities “by the most varied organizations which contribute a significant sum for permission” to hold such activities in Church buildings?

            Having just watched the Church Assembly where “hundreds of hierarch, glistening with golden robes” took part in a service, “you involuntarily think: is Christ involved in all this?  What does all this have to do with the Gospels and why is it necessary for such expenditure of effort, means and time?”

             The Gospels suggest a very different kind of behavior than that, Avdeyev concludes, and he suggests that the actions of Pussy Riot in calling attention to such departures from Biblical injunctions are thus especially frightening to the Church and its government backers because they are part of a particularly Russian tradition involving speaking truth to power.